A conventional mandolin is part of the lute family and, indeed, it used to be called the "little lute". It came to Europe from the Orient and was already well established by the sixteenth century. Vivaldi himself wrote Concerti for mandolin and orchestra and even Paganini first played the mandolin before he took up the violin. This was probably because his father was an accomplished mandolin player. Paganini dropped the mandolin early on in favor of the violin, which was considered a more serious musical instrument. The mandolin was and is tuned exactly like the violin, but, having no bow and a flat fingerboard, the instrument had and has no sustain. In order to obtain a sustain-like sound, it was necessary for the mandolin player to continuously pluck the strings and therefore the technique used in playing the mandolin was much different than the technique used in playing the violin.
In spite of the fact that the violin was considered the more serious musical instrument, the mandolin survived, but its function and technique became more fixed and rigid with time. Gibson, in the early part of the twentieth century, tried to make the mandolin the instrument of choice over the violin and up to a point succeeded with big mandolin orchestras which were known in the 1920's. But the characteristics of the mandolin used by Gibson at that time did not change. It was the same conventional mandolin known in the prior centuries, in that it had eight strings associated in pairs and tuned, from top to bottom (position-wise), to the G,D,A and E notes.
The conventional acoustic mandolin is provided with double strings for each note to give the instrument more volume; however, each string double makes for a very slow left hand technique and, as such, is the opposite of the violin which requires a very fast left hand technique for many pieces written for the violin.
Gibson experimented with a mandolin having a 137/8 inch scale length, that is, the same scale length for the Stradivari type violin. However, this necessitated very small frets which made it even more difficult to obtain a left hand technique which would permit the fast arpeggios known in music written for the violin, for example.
The mandolin player, of course, could not try to compete with the violinist, but rather accepted the limitations of the mandolin instrument and built up a very basic technique around those limitations.
In the 1950's, Gibson introduced an electric, solid body mandolin which, apart from the fact that it was a solid body and had a pick up, it had exactly the same characteristics of the old acoustic mandolins. Fender subsequently introduced an unsuccessful electric mandolin which only had four strings, like a violin. Apparently Fender believed that since the sounds made by the instrument were being amplified anyway, there was no need for the extra four strings which had originally been used for the sake of additional volume. The Fender mandolin had the same small frets as is seen in the prior art which do not allow a fast, developed left hand technique necessary for playing fast arpeggios such as can be found in music written for the violin.
A modern electric guitar does permit a fast left hand technique, but it is tuned differently than the violin and mandolin. Still, the playing of fast arpeggios such as found in violin-type music is possible on a modern electric guitar. A suitable guitar, for that purpose, is disclosed in my prior U.S. patent application Ser. No. 636,416, filed Dec. 31, 1990 in the name of the present inventor and now U.S. Pat. No. 5,113,737, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference.
A modern studio quality guitar is, however, a rather expensive instrument. The instrument disclosed in the accompanying Application is estimated to have a retail price of only one-third to one-quarter the retail price of a modern, studio-quality electric guitar and a retail price of less than five to ten percent of a studio quality violin.